Darian Leader

My rationale for reading 'Introducing Lacan' was that I aspire one day to finish a book by Slavoj Žižek. Žižek is a contemporary left-wing political philosopher who shares my fascination with Robespierre, so of course I want to read his books. Unfortunately, my attempts thus far have been stymied by Žižek's copious use of Lacanian terms (and other philosophical/psychological language that I don't understand). A quick internet search is insufficient to provide clarity, especially as I've never studied psychology.

So, did this book help me understand Lacan's ideas and, by extension, language? Yes, insofar as I previously didn't understand them at all. That said, I think I need to reread this book at least once and maybe read another similar text. I am certainly not ready to explain Lacan's graph of desire, although the idea of it appeals. That said, Lacan is supposed to be difficult, so I'm not surprised. Moreover, I now feel like I want to read more about psychoanalysis, which it turns out is rather fascinating.

The elements of Lacan's work that I found most approachable concerned language (a structure) as distinct from speech (a performance). I liked Lacan's thoughts on the process of assigning meaning to language during childhood. The idea of a chain of signifiers, which reveal meaning in the space between them, is also useful. I've always found the importance of words to human identity and personality very interesting. (At one point, I had this idea that a human soul consists of a tangle of words; I strongly identified human consciousness with use of words. Then I came across a thought experiment - a baby is born that can use none of the five senses and grows up unable to sense their surroundings or communicate. Can they be said to possess consciousness as we understand it? If so, would they spontaneously structure their thoughts in words, without any external example of language to follow? I have no answers, but that thought experiment blew my mind. And ruined any clarity I ever had about whether I believed in a human soul.)

Other terms that I now have at least some understanding of thanks to this book: jouissance, phantasy, transference (which Lacan understood differently to Freud, it seems), and the phallus. I liked the irony of the word phallus being used so frequently at one point in this book that it lost all meaning. This amused me because to Lacan 'the phallus' is (as I understand it) always an absent object, not meaningless but literally meaning nothing(ness). This also made me wonder to what extent the labelling of abstract concepts with gendered words embeds prejudices within psychoanalysis. At the time Freud and Lacan were writing, the feminist critiques of structural misogyny hadn't happened. Moreover, Lacan apparently considered the basis of men's and women's sexuality to be fundamentally different, which apart from any other problems presupposes a strict gender binary. I presume subsequent psychoanalytic theorists have addressed this? Dammit, the problem with reading an introduction to a previously unknown field is that I now want to know more about it.

I suppose in that case this book can be said to have done its work. I feel much better informed about Lacan's life and work, I have learned some of the key terms he used, and there are various concepts which I didn't grasp but might with further research (such as the castration complex, 'not-all', and 'sinthome'). The book was quick to read and flowed well, probably because the cartoons and other imagery seemed better integrated into the text than was the case in 'Introducing Focault'. I particularly liked the illustration used for the concept of a circular square.… (more)